Ghosts of August

Gene Weingarten was rooting around in the past and came up with a 400-word essay I wrote for Tropic Magazine in the “Calendar Issue” that ran the last Sunday of the year in 1986. This was a gimmick issue, where we had full page calendars accompanied by a piece of art and a short essay relating to each month. My month was August. It’s very interesting to read something you wrote that you have no (or almost no) memory of having written. That sense of not knowing what the next sentence, the next word, is going to be is essential to the reading experience — and impossible for the author to duplicate — EXCEPT if it’s something he wrote 30 years earlier and hasn’t thought of since. As in this case.
Gene’s verdict was that it was 8% overwritten, and I can accept that. But as I read it, as if it were the first time I was ever seeing this particular grouping of words, I thought, “not bad.”

AUGUST IN MIAMI
1986

By August, the heat is like an injury you keep reinjuring. You begin to worry that all that pain has got to add up to something bad. It bakes your paint job and cracks your vinyl dash. It melts the asphalt and lingers spitefully at night. Your sheets are damp.

Each day is the same, and the ocean is flat, windless, heavy — molten lead. ‘ It rains, but the rain brings no relief, and mold grows in your closets and you think it’s growing between your toes and on your teeth. Flossing doesn’t help either, and you begin to feel that whatever is growing isn’t mold but malignancy.

And then you understand a hurricane, you understand the angry force that spawns it. The sun cauterizes the ocean, a hot poker on an open wound. Power hemorrhages from the sky day upon day. The threat is born, and the threat is fed.

It is a threat you have to wake up with in the morning and sleep with at night, like the missiles in the submarines swimming up the Gulf Stream, or the words “I want a divorce” in a bad marriage. And like all threats you live with, you forget about it until the sun pounds it into your brain again, or if your head is deep in the sand, it takes the man on the 11 o’clock news.

Will you pull down the storm shutters that have been rusted in place for a decade? Will you pack your bags and roll up the carpets and leave for who knows where at 3 in the morning? Because if you believe what August has been trying to tell you, you shouldn’t have built or bought a house here in the first place. And will your insurance cover the loss or even begin to? Will the causeways be clogged? Or just washed out to sea?

The heat of August threatens to go on in unchanging monotony to the end of time. Until it starts to push the sea over the sea wall and threatens to change everything instead. Change beyond recognition or redemption. For the only point of the month is the Storm, or the threat of the Storm and to walk through the heat is nothing against walking with that dark threat on your back: a disaster with no one to blame, the kind of random, unpredictable horror we hope to eliminate with our vaccines and C-sections, V-E Day and the Neighborhood Crime Watch.

Back to Newsbreak: The watch has become a warning. It takes 12 hours to get out, and the storm is, or may be, only nine hours away. Since it is the middle of the night, you go to sleep with the radio on and wake up to blue skies and wind and another threat that was just a bad dream.

And now you’ve got a whole season, two seasons, of cool, but not too cool, breezes — six months to pretend that nothing is out there, nothing threatens. Six months to forget.